SongKong Tagging using Compilation albums and ignoring earlier releases? Please Help!

[dmn1981]

Hi All,

Hoping that someone can help me with a problem i’m having trying to get SongKong to tag songs correctly. based on my settings.

I’ll try and describe my situtaion as clear as i can, so here goes.

I’ve got about 20k songs, all dance music from betwen 1990 to 2010 roughly. For years i have been trying to tag these all correctly, and the best tagger i could find was TagScanner, as i wanted to use the Discogs database as the data source. However, TagScanner is manual 1 by 1 and its taken me years to even just scratch the surface of my collection. Then i came across SongKong 2 weeks ago and reaslised it was automated and used discogs! I immediately purchased the Pro license and started tagging my collections in batched of 100’s and 1000’s, i thought i’d found the holy grail! However…

Last night i noticed that it has tagged around 100 tracks against the same Album, which isnt a problem as such, however, in my case it is. Because it tagged all the tracks as one album, it tagged them as all released in 2008, which for most songs on the album is not when the original was released.

I’m wanting to tag all of my songs as their original individual release date, and ideally not as part of a compilation album.

Bearing in mind that most of music is dance from between 1990 and 2010, a lot of it was originally released on vinyl or digital, and thats how i want the music to be tagged.

I took 1 track from the album i noticed it had tagged 100 tracks from, and searched for it on Discogs via Tagscanner, it was originally released in 1996 on vinyl, which is this track:

DJ DNA Meets Dougal* - Reality (Remix) / Hornz

However, SongKong tagged it as part of this compilationm album from 2008, which is this one:

https://www.discogs.com/Various-100-Anthems-Hardcore/release/1253514 (CD 4 Track 16)

I decided to completely remove all of the IDv3 tags from the mp3 using TagScanner, and put it back through SongKong, and it again picked up the track on the compilation album.

I then decided to check the Basic and Match settings i had configured, and adjusted them to hopefully pick up the track using just discogs on vinyl (removing CD, Digital. Casette, and preferring earliest release date etc). I’ve now got the settings this:

Each time i try and fix this song with SongKong, it always picks it up from the compilation album! I’m not sure why it’s not picking this track up from the original release i have above on vinyl from 1996??

Ideally i want SongKong to completelyt ignore Compilation albums, as the vast majority of my music would have been released on vinyl or digital, in probably 99% of cases.

I’ve now realised that 1000s of the tracks i have already put through SongKong have compilations album covers and release dates, most of which were many years early.

This is really frustrating, and whilst its manual, its starting to make me think that TagScanner would be a better option as i can be completely accurate with the tagging, it will just take me a LOT longer.

Hopefully that makes sense, and someone can help me with my challenge. How do i get SongKong to use Discogs only, always pick the earliest release year, ignore compilation albums and always pick Vinyl or Digital (ignore CDs!)???

Thanks

Darren

[paultaylor]

Hi, I guess you have lumped all your songs into a single folder rather than seperate album folders, usually when people care about albums they put them in album folders, and when SongKong sees a folder of songs it trys to find the album that can best match the most songs because that is what users usually want.

The good news is that SongKong writes the album date to the YEAR field but the earliest release date of that song to the ORIGINAL YEAR field. So in many cases ORIGINAL YEAR probably holds the date that you want, and you can also set SongKong to store the ORIGINAL YEAR in the YEAR field by enabling Format:Use Original Release Date

Do you only need the date correcting or do you need the earlies t album name as well (for these single tracks) ?

If so the best thing to do would be put each track into its own folder, remove the metadata and then run SongKong again on it. I can probably help you better with this if you run Create Support Files so I can see exactly how your files are organized, and how many have actually been matched to compilations.

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply. To answer your questions, yes all files were in one folder, as they were all the same genre, which is just how i store my file, its the meta data they gets used by media players, so the folder structure if irrelevant.

Under Format, i already have the Use Original Release Date ticked:

Do you only need the date correcting or do you need the earlies t album name as well (for these single tracks?
I want the original album (in most cases the vinyl release name) and the original year of release (not a compilation year release date). I also want the original artwork, so with the vinyl releases i want the vinyl centre artwork, not a compilation cover.

If so the best thing to do would be put each track into its own folder
That’s what i have done to test this single file, it still picks up the 2008 compilation and not the 1996 vinyl release.

remove the metadata
I did that also, just left the title and artist so it could find the release on discogs.

I can probably help you better with this if you run Create Support Files
I just did that, i assume you will have received these remotely?

Thanks
Darren

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul,

I just tried another file from that album in a seperate folder on its own, and it picked up the song from Discogs OK, not from the compilation album, however, it picked a release from 2001 and not the actual release from 1998, which was a particular remix of the song (it had the name of remixer in the title), and it’s completely ignored that info…

Its seeming that its not quite as accurate as i’d like it to be… Or should be based on the fact the core info is there for it to search the Discogs database.

Darren

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul,

I tried you suggestion of putting 50 files in to individual folder per song and ran it through SongKong, and the vast majority has been tagged again as the same album, as per below…

It doesnt seem to want to ever try and find any of the files as individual vinyl releases? This really isnt meeting my needs, and i’ve already put 1000’s through SongKong, and i’m now concerned that its tagged 100’s of songs incorrectly…

How can we fix this?

Darren

[paultaylor]

@dmn1981

Thanks for the reply. To answer your questions, yes all files were in one folder, as they were all the same genre, which is just how i store my file, its the meta data they gets used by media players, so the folder structure if irrelevant.

Okay, so you are right that the folder structure is irrelevant when playing the songs (by metadata) but its not irrelevent when autotagging, and just about every tagging tool will perform better if songs are already organized by folder. In the case of SongKong the reasons for this is that very many songs are likely to be available on more than one album, including various incarnations of the original album plus compilations. So if the metadata is poor how does SongKong know the right album to get, the folder hierachy provides some helpful album metadata, especially for grouping songs. When more than one match is valid for a song the matches are scored based on how closely the match the song (such as track length, existing metadata) and user preferences (preferred media type, country ectera). Original album do get a boost against against compilation albums but maybe outweighed by the other factors.

Now I do see in your case that if SongKong had a Never Match to Compilations option that would be very useful. The problem with it is that SongKong is designed so it can be run over complete collections and most users do actually have some songs that are only available on compilations, and also some compilation albums that they would prefer to be matched against. Maybe I can fine tune an option that generally prevents compilations matches but allows them sometimes.

Your remix problem highlights another issue. When matching to MusicBrainz SongKong can use existing metadata AND/OR acoustic fingerprints, in many cases the fingerprint can then directly link to a MusicBrainz song. Because this is listening to the audio it rarely gets the wrong song (even if maybe not be your preferred album) , and this includes dealing with remixes. But because you have disabled matching to MusicBrainz it can only do a metadata match for Discogs, and the dealing with things like remixes is harder because all matches have to be fuzzy, if we only did exact = metadatamatch there would be few matches. And also sorry I forgot ORIGINAL RELEASE and ORIGINAL YEAR is currently only supported for MusicBrainz matches not Discogs matches (SONGKONG-703).

If you renable MusicBrainz matches you’ll get much better matching results, especially if you can put the tracks into their own folders to start with. Please try your 50 file testcase again (with the data scrubbed first as it points to wrong album), if it doesnt’ work please send support files again immediately afterwards and I will do deep analysis to work out the issue.

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul.

Thanks for your detailed response, and explanation on how SongKong is designed.

I appreciate how the application has been built, and also appreciate that you cant build something that fits for everyones use case, however, in my use case its turned out to be the opposite of what i need, and i’ve now paid for the Pro License on top.

I’ve scrubbed the Metadata from the 50 files except title and artist. Added them to their own folder and re-run through SongKong with MusicBrainz turned on, its identified every single file from the compilation album:

Whilst the year is now not 2008 on every single one, it is on the vast majority of them. Now its quite possible that these particular files have been ripped from that album many years ago, and MusicBrainz is matching the track length, which makes sense. Just not for me.

If the option to EXCLUDE compilation albums was available that would be useful, and if possible ONLY match Vinyl releases, rather than ‘Preferred’ Vinyl releases, that would also help.

Is this something you could add to an update? How long would that take to implement?

Its really disappointing that i’ve already tagged 1000s of songs which its possible its now change the correct year to the wrong year, and also the album.

Thanks

Darren

[paultaylor]

Can you please resend support files I should be able to track down why it’s still matching compilation, it shouldn’t be doing this.

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul.

I’ve just created the support files

I will also add that a lot of the music i have would be classed as more ‘underground’ than Commercial, so a lot of my music will probably not be on MusicBrainz and highly likely on Discogs.

Thanks

Darren

[paultaylor]

Hi

I think the problem is that you are not actually clearing out all the metadata before rerunning the test, the image below is from Report66 (not Report67) which I believe is first attempt and you can see that there are many fields in white mean the value is unchanged, i.e they already had the value before you ran Fix Songs.

The easiest way to clear out all the data is as follows

• Download my other tool, Jaikoz
• Load 50 file test
• Select Edit/Delete all Metadata

• Select File/Save Changes:

Jaikoz Trial will allow you to modify upto 20 files in a session, so in order to save 50 files files you’ll have to start/save, restart/save/restart save

Then if you could rerun the SongKong test this should give better results, and then rerun Create Support Files

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul,

I followed your process and installed Jaikoz, removed ALL metadata from all 50 test files (20 at a time), reloaded them back in to Songkong, and i got the same result, 49 attached to the same album, 1 from a different release…

Thoughts??!!

Darren

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul,

Would it help if i sent you a couple of my mp3 files, linked the Discogs release for each that i want to match to, so you can work on them, to see if you can find a solution?

Thanks

Darren

[paultaylor]

@dmn1981

Would it help if i sent you a couple of my mp3 files, linked the Discogs release for each that i want to match to, so you can work on them, to see if you can find a solution?

Hi Darren
That would help yes, but in first instance can you please run Create Support Files again so I can check this last run please.

[paultaylor]

Hi @dmn1981

I just took another look and I realized that in Report66 you didn’t have MusicBrainz matching enabled

and then ran you Report67 you had fixed the options but the data has not been cleaned, so keen to see your last attempt.

Edit, thanks looking at it now

[paultaylor]

Okay, I have looked at the last report (Report00068) and that has been run correctly.

Unfortunately I have checked ten songs at random from these 50 songs in every case the only instance of that song in MusicBrainz is a Various Artists compilation so there is nothing else it can match it to. It seems unlikely this would be the situation with the majority of your files but it is the case with these.

Could we try repeating this test starting with the files with no metadata and each being in their own folder and disable Search for a MusicBrainz match, and see if the Discogs only matching has any success with matching them to their own albums.

Is it possible to try the previous test on a larger sample of files ?

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul,

I will clear the metadata again, and run the it through SongKong with MusicBrainz turned off, and only have Match Discogs enabled (which i think i have done on most so far).

I think the challenge i have is that whilst MusicBrainz has a database that is almost 3 times the size of Discogs, the type and style of music i have is more aligned to the Discogs database, ie. less commercial and more underground/DJ music.

Ive been using TagScanner for many years now, and whilst is awfully manually, it prertty much always picks up any of music on Discogs, because its database is more closely aligned to my collection.

I’ve just run the 50 songs throuugh again with no metadata and only selected Match to Discogs. The results are below, and I have just also created another support file for you to review. Its made a complete mess of matching any of it. Its matched very little, and what it has matched is completely wrong?!

If i search any of these songs through TagScanner manually, it will pick up everything on Discogs as the individual vinyl release.

The current testing is showing me that SongKong isnt good enough for my use case/collection of music.

How can we get SongKong to match better to Discogs and be more specific, like TagScanner does??

Thanks

Darren

[paultaylor]

Okay so single song Discogs metatamatching is not accurate enough, scrap that.

So going back to having single songs in folder and no metadata and doing a MusicBrainz match this can use acoustids and metadata to accurately identify the song, it should also be able to identify the album if the album is in MusicBrainz but for your test it was not, but still the majority of the metadata is correct.

I would suggest you try a bigger test (ensuring each song is in own folder and remove metadata if currently matched to a compilation) and that should work for when the album is in MusicBrainz, and I am sure many are actually in the database.

Then for songs correctly identified except for the album SongKong will have added the majority of data for you, but you’ll have to do some (semi)manual editing. I think that Jaikoz may be a good bet here because you can use that to specify a particular MusicBrainz or Discogs release to match to, and you can edit in any way you like.

Because of the difficulties you have had if you would like I could send you a free Jaikoz license to help with this ?

[dmn1981]

Hi Paul,

I really appreciate your help you’ve given me here, its just a real shame that SongKong doesn’t match to Discogs as well as TagScanner appears to do, even if it is a manual process.

If SongKong had the same Disocgs matching capability, with the ability to be more specfic on the one you want, ie. Vinyl Only, Earliest Year, No Compilation, then i think it would be the best tagger out there.

I think its going to be a case of going back over what i have already put through SongKong, find all songs that have been attached to a compilation album, and then manually correct them with TagScanner or Jaikoz.

I’ll happily use Jaikoz if you could provide me with a licenses, that would be helpful, and somewhat helps ease the cost i’ve paid for the SongKong license!

Thanks

Darren

[paultaylor]

Hi, I do think that if you change your folder structure you will find that SongKong can match more of your songs to original albums. This is because it is only matching to compilations when the compilation album can match to more more songs in a logical grouping (folder) than any other song, or if the song can only be found in a compilation, changing the folder structure would mean it would only match to compilation in second case.

Would be useful if you could just run Status Report over your whole collection so I can get a better handle on the status of your collection as a whole.

In the meantime I have sent you a free Jaikoz license

[paultaylor]

I have also added SONGKONG-1997:Never match to compilation option to bug tracker